Corporate Complaints Privacy Notice

This privacy notice is designed to help you understand how the Council may process your personal data when dealing with corporate complaints.

This privacy notice supplements the key information in, and should be read alongside, the Council's corporate privacy notice.

On this page:

1. Who are we?

The Information Governance and Complaints Team is responsible for administering the Council's Corporate Complaints Procedure to allow individuals the opportunity to express dissatisfaction about any Council operated service.

A corporate complaint is 'an expression of dissatisfaction, however made, about the standard of service, actions or lack of action by the landlord, its own staff, or those acting on its behalf, affecting a resident or group of residents.'

We also record when individuals provide compliments and positive feedback about Council services.

2. Whose personal data do we process?

We will process the personal data of individuals who contact the Council regarding complaints, compliments and positive feedback. We may also process personal data regarding individuals who are a direct or indirect party to a complaint.

3. What type of personal data do we process?

The personal data we process may include:

Contact information including name, address, telephone number and email address;
Details of your complaint;
Any correspondence we have received from you, or any information passed to us by any other person/ organisation;
Financial information (for re-imbursements or payment of goodwill offers and/or compensation)

This may also include special category data where this is relevant to your complaint.

4. Why do we process personal data?

We need to process your personal data to enable us to deal with complaints and comments (feedback) made to the Council.

We are unable to process anonymous complaints as set out in our Corporate Complaints Procedure.

5. Where do we get your personal data from?

Much of the information we process will be obtained directly from your complaint or from a complaint made by another individual.

We may also receive your information via a councillor and/ or member of parliament (MP) if you have nominated one to make your complaint on your behalf.

We may also receive your personal data from other services within the Council as part of our administration of your complaint.

If you raise a complaint directly with either the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman or the Housing Ombudsman, they are likely to contact the Council regarding your complaint and share your information with us.

6. Who do we share your personal data with?

In order to process your complaint, we will need to share your personal data with other services within the Council which your complaint relates to.

We will disclose any relevant information to any officer that requires the information to investigate, respond to or administer the complaint. It may be shared with external organisations involved in delivering services on our behalf where the Council has a lawful basis to do so.

After you have exhausted the Council's internal Corporate Complaints Procedure you may choose to escalate your complaint to the relevant ombudsman. Should you choose to do this, we may share your information externally with the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman or the Housing Ombudsman, as applicable, if they request information from us when looking at your complaint.

7. What is the legal basis for using your personal data?

We rely on the following lawful basis to process personal data:

Public Task: The processing is necessary for the Council to perform a task in the public interest or for its official functions with a basis in law.

The legislation that relates to the Council's handling of complaints includes, but is not limited to:

Local Government Act 1974
Housing Act 1996
Building Safety Act 2022
Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023

We rely on an additional lawful basis to process your Special Categories of Personal Data. The lawful basis is "Reasons of substantial public interest (with a basis in law)" meeting the condition in Schedule 1, Part 2 of the Data Protection Act 2018 as below:

· (6) Statutory etc and government purposes.

8. Updates

This privacy notice and the corporate privacy notice are updated from time to time to take account of changes in our services, legal requirements and to make sure they are as transparent as possible, so please check back here for the current version. You can see when this privacy notice was last updated here: April 2024